Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T09:47:26.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Generation in debt: Family, politics, and youth subjectivities in Diyarbakır

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2015

Leyla Neyzi  and
Haydar Darıcı
Leyla Neyzi
Affiliation:
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University, Orta Mahalle, Tuzla 34956, İstanbul, Turkey, [email protected].
Haydar Darıcı
Affiliation:
joint program in anthropology and history, University of Michigan, 500 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA, [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper investigates the political subjectivities of Kurdish youth in Diyarbakır through the interplay of kinship and politics. We argue that it is through a framework of kinship that young people make sense of the Kurdish issue. We show that the war between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) and the Turkish military has reshaped the Kurdish family, leading to a crisis in the life cycle. We suggest that the young feel indebted to the Kurdish movement, which they express using the term bedel (“debt”). Debt is related to the family, as the individual becomes indebted as part of a kinship group. We argue that the expansion of public space in Diyarbakır has created alternative ways of paying debt and doing politics.

Keywords

WarviolencekinshipgenderKurdsTurkey.
Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 52 , May 2015 , pp. 55 - 75
Copyright
© New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Authors’ Note: The authors would like to thank Andrew Shyrock, Nazan Üstündağ and Ilgın Erdem for their feedback on a draft of this paper.

References

Açık, Necla. “Re-defining the Role of Women within the Kurdish National Movement in Turkey in the 1990s.” In The Kurdish Question in Turkey: New Perspectives on Violence, Representation, and Reconciliation, edited by Cengiz Güneş and Welat Zeydanlıoğlu, 114–136. London: Routledge, 2014.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2002.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated by Robert Hurley. 3 volumes. New York: Zone Books, 1988.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics.” In Cultural Studies and Political Theory, edited by Jodi Dean, 42–62. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Bourgeois, Philippe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Casier, Marlies and Jongerden, Joost. “Understanding Today’s Kurdish Movement: Leftist Heritage, Martyrdom, Democracy and Gender.” European Journal of Turkish Studies 14 (2012). http://ejts.revues.org/4656.Google Scholar
Çağlayan, Handan. Analar, Yoldaşlar, Tanrıçalar. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007.Google Scholar
Çağlayan, Handan. “From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in Post-1980s Turkey.” European Journal of Turkish Studies 14 (2012): 1–23.Google Scholar
Darıcı, Haydar. “‘Adults See Politics as a Game’: Politics of Kurdish Children in Urban Turkey.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 4 (October 2013): 775–790.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Das, Veena. “Modernity and Biography: Women’s Lives in Contemporary India.” Thesis Eleven 39 (1994): 52–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Das, Veena and Leonard, Lori. “Kinship, Memory, and Time in the Lives of HIV/AIDS Patients in a North American City.” In Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, edited by Janet Carsten, 194–217. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Dhillon, Navtej and Yousef, Tarik. “Introduction.” In Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East, edited by Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef, 1–10. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2009.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary. “Foreword.” In Marcel Mauss, The Gift, translated by W.D. Halls, ix–xxiii. London: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Fassin, Didier and Rechtman, Richard. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Gambetti, Zeynep. “The Conflictual (Trans)formation of the Public Sphere in Urban Space: The Case of Diyarbakır.” New Perspectives on Turkey 32 (2005): 43–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geerse, Miriam. The Everyday Violence of Forced Displacement. Amsterdam: Rosenberg Publisher, 2010.Google Scholar
Güneş, Cengiz. The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance. London: Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Jongerden, Joost. The Settlement Issues in Turkey and the Kurds: An Analysis of Spatial Policies, Modernity and War. Leiden: Brill, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joseph, Suad. Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, and Identity. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Öcalan, Abdullah. Bir Halkı Savunmak. İstanbul: Çetin Yayınları, 2004.Google Scholar
Özar, Şemsa, Uçarlar, Nesrin, and Aytar, Osman. Geçmişten Günümüze Türkiye’de Paramiliter Bir Yapılanma: Köy Koruculuğu Sistemi. Diyarbakır: DİSA Yayınları, 2013.Google Scholar
Kurban, Dilek, Yükseker, Deniz, Çelik, Ayşe Betül, Ünalan, Turgay, and Aker, A. Tamer. Coming to Terms with Forced Migration: Post-Displacement Restitution of Citizenship Rights in Turkey. İstanbul: TESEV, 2007.Google Scholar
Lüküslü, Demet and Yücel, Hakan. Gençlik Halleri. İstanbul: Efil Yayınevi, 2013.Google Scholar
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. Translated by W.D. Halls. London: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Munn, Nancy D. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Neyzi, Leyla and Darıcı, Haydar. Özgürüm Ama Mecburiyet Var: Diyarbakırlı ve Muğlalı Gençler Anlatıyor. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2013.Google Scholar
Nichanian, Marc. The Historiographic Perversion. Translated by Gil Anidjar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piot, Charles. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richman, Michele. Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Sayın, Mahir. Erkeği Öldürmek. İstanbul: Zelal Yayınları, 1998.Google Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Sargent, Carolyn. Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Shyrock, Andrew. “Thinking about Hospitality with Derrida, Kant, and the Balga Bedouin.” Anthropos 103 (2008): 405–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Thiranagama, Sharika. “The Self at a Time of War in Northern Sri Lanka.” Journal of Historical Sociology 26, no. 1 (2013): 19–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Üngör, Uğur Ümit. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Üstündağ, Nazan. “Pornografik Devlet, Erotik Direniş: Kürt Erkek Bedenlerinin Genel Ekonomisi.” In Erkek Millet, Asker Millet: Türkiye de Militarizm, Milliyetçilik, Erkek(lik)ler, edited by Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu, 513–536. İstanbul: İletişim Yayinları, 2013.Google Scholar
Watts, Nicole F. Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Yalçın-Heckmann, Lale. Tribe and Kinship among the Kurds. New York: P. Lang, 1991.Google Scholar
Yentürk, Nurhan, et al.Türkiye’de Gençlik Politikaları ve Çalışması. İstanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2008.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.Google Scholar